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COPYRIGHT DKPOSm 



IN MEMORIAM: O. W. 



THE EDITION OF THIS BOOK 
IS LIMITED TO 975 COPIES 



PRINTED AT 

THE LITERARY COLLECTOR PRESS 

GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT 



IN MEMORIAM 
OSCAR WILDE 



BY 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 
ANDRfe GIDE AND FRANZ BLEI 

Translation and Introduction 



by 



PERCIYAL POLLARD 



GREENWICH, CONN. 

THE LITERARY COLLECTOR PRESS 

1905 



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T 13 1905 . \ r \ 



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Copyright, 1905 
By The Literary Collector Press 



05-330*/*/ 



CONTENTS 

Introduction 

By Percival Pollard - - 9 
In Memoriam : O. W. 

By Andre Gide - - - 29 
In Memoriam : O. W. 

Ernest La Jeunesse - - 75 

In Memoriam : O. W. 

By Franz Blei .... 97 



INTRODUCTION 

BY 

PERCIVAL POLLARD 



INTRODUCTION 



STROLLING in the rare sunshine 
that visited Berlin this May of 
1905, a whim took me into a quaint 
little bookshop that faces the work- 
shop of venerable Joseph Joachim. 
There, among that litter of old and 
new, in all tongues, I found crystal- 
lised what much other observation 
had already hinted. Namely, that 
upon the continental literature con- 
cerning itself primarily with formal 

9 2 



INTRODUCTION 



art no exotic influence was more 
noticeable, at that moment, than that 
of the late Oscar Wilde. Exotic influ- 
ence upon the German theatre was 
discernible enough; here were farces 
from the French: there dismal stuff 
from Scandinavia, Strindberg and 
Bjoernson to the fore: even Bernard 
Shaw and J. M. Barrie were repre- 
sented in translation. But, to name 
the piece that was being played often- 
est, on both sides of the Rhine, we 
had to hark back to a play by Wilde, 
"Salome." When you went bey ond the 
theatre, eying the windows of the 
booksellers, you saw Wilde's name 
everywhere, — his ' ' De Profundis ' ' was 
the most famous book of the season 
in Berlin, as in France and England ; 
or, at any rate, the booksellers seemed 
10 



INTRODUCTION 



to intimate that; they positively 
plastered their show-cases and win- 
dows with Wilde literature. 

Much of this Wilde literature was 
but repetition of what, despite our 
whilom Puritanic aversion from this 
writer's work, is already fairly fa- 
miliar to us. One curious little book 
I came upon, however, of such inti- 
mate, melancholy interest, that I took 
it away with me. Its title was "In 
Memoriam: 0. W.," and as I sipped 
my cup of Berliner Kafke at the Aus- 
tria, I determined some day to turn 
it into English. This I have now 
done. 

To persons whose notions of Ger- 
man art have been formed upon the 
sculpture of Rheinhold Begas, or the 
literature of the Gartenlaube type, 
11 



INTRODUCTION 



it may seem curious that such a talent 
as Wilde's should find anything like an 
echo of sympathy in the land of Sud- 
ermann and Hauptmann. But those 
persons are unaware of the tremen- 
dous modernisation that has come 
over German art and letters. I can 
here only hint at the facts. The 
movement typified in England by the 
Yellow Book, in America by The 
Lark, the Chap-book, and similar 
attempts away from the academic, 
had a few years later its German 
echo. In art a whole school of suc- 
cessful men now testifies to this influ- 
ence ; in illustration there are Jugend 
and Simplicissimus, conveying to the 
public the work of the younger 
Munich men ; and in letters there are 
such men as Ernst Yon Wolzogen, 
12 



INTRODUCTION 



Frank Wedekind, Otto Bierbaum, 
Richard Dehmel, and many others. 
Just as through Beardsley, Wilde's 
influence upon our illustrative and 
decorative arts— in houses as well as 
in print — may still distinctly be felt, 
so upon a number of German writers, 
for print and playhouse, the Irish- 
man's influence is undoubted. Aside 
from the obvious proofs that met the 
hastiest eye ; the fact that the show- 
windows of Berlin were plastered 
with Wilde literature; it was rather 
in the thought-mode of a number of 
successful writers of the lighter sort, 
some of whom I named just now, that 
I found myself marking the flowing of 
an impetus that had sprung from the 
author of " Salome." I could even 
trace to him the mainspring of the 
13 



INTRODUCTION 



curious movement of some years ago 
that sought to give to the German 
music-hall the dignity of actual art ; 
this movement, in its dissolution, 
evaporated into what is now the 
"cabaret" of Berlin. 

To me the tremendous popular in- 
terest in everything connected with 
Wilde was peculiarly of moment. In 
January of 1901 , a month after Wilde's 
death, I had written here in America 
an essay seeking to rehabilitate the 
man's position as an artist. If I be- 
lieved my friends, it was foolhardy 
thus to fly into the face of Puritania, 
where his name still spelt anathema. 
In the course of my considerable ap- 
preciation of the man's artistic ac- 
complishments I made some forecasts. 
Time has more than borne me out. 
14 



INTRODUCTION 



Plays by Wilde have been performed 
in London, in Australia, in California, 
as well as in Continental Europe; and 
at the moment the revival of Wilde 
interest everywhere, spurred by the 
publication of his letters from prison, 
is inescapable. In introducing the 
work of the three contributors to "In 
Memoriam: 0. W.", perhaps I may, in 
passing, recall some few phrases from 
my essay of January, 1901, inasmuch 
as they match adequately the general 
color of this little book : 

Whatever the man's faults and fla- 
grancies, I wrote, the man's works will 
none the less keep the name of Oscar 
Wilde from oblivion. No matter how 
much of nausea his decline and fall 
may fill one with, the children of his 
brain deserve consideration sheerly on 
15 



INTRODUCTION 



their own merits. In no just scale is 
the man allowed to weigh against 
the creatures of his mind. The poem 
and the play, the story and the essay, 
have a life, a worth, that has nothing 
whatever to do with the life and 
worth of their creator. . . We have 
only to recall Poe, Byron, Shelley and 
Verlaine to remember that great tal- 
ent is not infrequently companion to 
great vices. Some of Wilde's work, it 
is true, may seem to be sicklied over 
with the taint of his baser self. " Sa- 
lome," "The Picture of Dorian Grey" 
and "The Sphinx" suffer from being 
construed too much in the shadow of 
his personal scandal. What, on the 
other hand, could be more exquisite 
than "The Happy Prince and other 
Tales," "The House of Pomegran- 
16 



INTRODUCTION 



ates," the "Poems," or more witty 
than the critical essays in " Inten- 
tions"? To deny the power of this 
man's writings, now when he is dust, 
and when his baser part may well 
have oblivion as its share, is to com- 
mit the folly committed by the British 
Museum when it withdrew from cir- 
culation the books it once, for their 
intrinsic merits, had housed, and to 
surpass in injustice the act of the 
theatre managers who stopped the 
successful runs of plays written by 
Wilde on account of the then obloquy 
of his name. 

Aside from the final succession of 
tragedies that closed the public career 
of Oscar Wilde, the impress made by 
the man was certainly as much a part 
of the history of the manners of the 
17 



INTRODUCTION 



nineteenth century in its decadence 
as his writings were a part of its lit- 
erature. . . . One may conceive that 
in Wilde a perverse sense of loyalty to 
art kept him from ever displaying the 
real depth below his obvious insincer- 
ities ; he had begun by being a public 
fool ; he had succeeded in establishing 
folly as a reputation for himself; and 
the rumor of his paradoxic brilliance 
was too secure and too amusing for 
him to risk shattering it with glimpses 
of more serious depths. Yet who that 
reads his sonnet "De Profundis" but 
must feel that, under the glitter and 
the pose, there was something else, 
something the gay world of London 
knew nothing of. Expressive of his 
career, his disgrace, his heights and 
his depths, this poem is necessary to 
18 



INTRODUCTION 



the attempt at understanding its 
author. This was the cry of his soul : 

To drift with every passion till my soul 

Is a stringed lute whereon all winds may play — 

Is it for this that I have given away 

Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control ? 

Methinks my life is a twice- written scroll 
Scrawled over in some boyish holiday, 
With idle songs for pipe and virelay, 
That do but mar the beauty of the whole. 

Surely there was a time I might have trod 
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance 
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God ! 
Is that time lost ? Lo, with a little rod 
I did but touch the honey of romance, 
And must 1 lose a soul's inheritance? 

That holds a quality that leads one 
to think of Yerlaine and his curious 
commingling of the mystic and the 
animal. Indeed, in life as in works, 
the similarity between these two, the 
19 



INTRODUCTION 



Frenchman and the Irishman, is 
strong. It is in the verses I have just 
quoted that the man's superiority 
over such a man, say, as Catulle 
Mendes, shows. Mendes was once 
"the wickedest man in Paris," and 
he remains the most striking instance 
of the brilliant man of letters who 
has done almost everything nearly as 
well as the master of that particular 
craft. But of soul he has only the 
ghost. Wilde posed as a Soul only in 
the spirit in which that word was then, 
in the 'Eighties, used in English soci- 
ety, as opposed to the Smart ; he pre- 
tended nothing about him was genu- 
ine; he passed for a symbol of his 
own clever defence of liars; yet in 
" De Profundis " the soul gave its cry. 
Nothing of the black shadow that 
20 



INTRODUCTION 



ousted him from the world, that 
made him as one dead even before 
death, should creep over his writings 
and his earlier achievements for art 
and culture. We read De Maupassant, 
and his scarlet sins and black butter- 
flies no longer concern us ; a verse or 
so of Verlaine's will outlive that of 
the most stainless curate who ever 
was horrified at the thought of ab- 
sinthe; D'Annunzio and Mendes sin 
quite as fluently, according to the 
Puritans, as they write. Millions 
have lived righteously without leav- 
ing for posterity anything so fine as 
u The Ballad of Reading Gaol." . . . 
No death in all history seems more 
horrid than this one. Beau Brummell 
in Calais, Yerlaine in Paris do not ap- 
proach this, nor yet Heine on his pal- 
21 



INTRODUCTION 



let. One may fancy the beautiful, 
cruel, yet pitiful wanton, Paris, whis- 
pering by the bed of this once brilliant 
Irishman : 

" For none can tell to what red Hell 
His sightless soul may stray." 

Those, then, were some of the things 
I had printed within a month of 
Wilde's death. Meanwhile, what he 
had hinted in his sonnet "De Profun- 
dis" he had elaborated in his letters 
from prison to Mr. Ross, eventually 
issued as a book under the same title. 
Just as Pierre Loti once wrote a book 
of Pity and of Death, so might "De 
Profundis" be called Wilde's book of 
Pity and of Life. Just as that book 
hinted at the tragedy of Wilde's pris- 
on life, a tragedy more of soul than 
of body, so does this present little 
22 



INTRODUCTION 



volume disclose some few facts touch- 
ing upon the man's life after leaving 
prison. The few had perforce to read 
"De Profundis" in the light of their 
knowledge that Wilde, after all his 
beautiful resolutions and conclusions 
in that document, reverted to the 
baser self, and died with his life fallen 
far below the altitude marked in the 
prison letters. That knowledge of 
the few is set forth in concrete, inti- 
mate, personal manner in the follow- 
ing pages. It is true that on some 
points even these documents are in 
conflict ; as in the matter of the num- 
ber following Wilde's body to his 
grave. But the glimpses of the man 
just before death, as Ernest La Jeun- 
esse and Andre Gide give them to us 
in these pages, remain incontestably 
23 



INTRODUCTION 



valuable. He died and was buried. 
Whether seven followed the coffin, or 
thirteen ; whether he lies in this ceme- 
tery or that; what matter? His 
work lives on. Mr. Robert Ross has 
lately retold, circumstantially, the de- 
tails of Wilde's burial, of the difficul- 
ties encountered in the fact of Wilde's 
dying under an assumed name in 
Paris, and of the purely temporary 
nature of his present resting place ; it 
being the intention, some time in 
1906, to obtain a permanent plot in 
Pere La Chaise. 

A word or two about the authors 
with whose pages I am taking the 
liberty of very free translation. M. 
La Jeunesse is one of the most witty 
of the younger Parisians. Much of 
his work has been on the impudent 
24 



INTRODUCTION 



and amusing plane of a Max Beer- 
bohm. His volume The Nights, The 
Ennuis and the Souls of our Most 
Notorious Contemporaries, criticised, 
chiefly by way of parody, all the big- 
gest toads in the puddle of French 
letters; Zola, Bourget, Maeterlinck 
and Anatole France all suffered his 
scalpel. About M. Gide I regret that 
I can tell you nothing ; I prefer to in- 
vent nothing. Herr Franz Blei is one 
of the several talented men connected 
with the German monthly, Die In- 
sel } published in Leipzig two or three 
years ago, under the direction of Otto 
Julius Bierbaum. Bierbaum and Blei 
occasionally wrote for the stage to- 
gether, and Blei has constantly been 
to the fore in translating for German 
readers the works of such men as 
25 3 



INTRODUCTION 



Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and 
Ernest Dowson. 

The D— referred to in M. Gide's 
pages is, of course, Lord Alfred 
Douglas. 

The hotel-keeper, mentioned on page 
71, guards to this day, the rooms in 
which Wilde died, as a shrine, not with- 
out pecuniary profit. Indeed, visitors 
have had amusing proof of the inex- 
haustible store of relics he commands. 
Percival Pollard. 



26 



IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 
ANDRE GIDE 



IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 



THOSE who came to know Wilde 
only in the latter years of his life 
can scarcely, in view of that feeble and 
infirm existence, have had any concep- 
tion of this wonderful personality. It 
was in 1891 that first I saw him. 
Wilde had at that time what Thacke- 
ray termed the most important of 
talents, success. His gestures, his 
look, were triumphant. So complete 
was his success that it seemed as if it 
29 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

had preceded him, and Wilde had 
nothing to do but follow it tip. His 
books were talked about. Plays of 
his were on at several London thea- 
tres. He was rich; he was famous; 
he was beautiful. Happiness and 
honors were his. One likened him to 
an Asiatic Bacchus; or to a Roman 
Emperor, or even to Apollo himself — 
what is certain is that he was radiant. 
When he came to Paris, his name 
traveled from lip to lip ; one told the 
most absurd anecdotes about him: 
Wilde was pictured as everlastingly 
smoking gold-tipped cigarettes and 
strolling about with a sunflower in 
his hand. For Wilde had always the 
gift of playing up to those who now- 
adays fashion fame, and he made for 
himself an amusing mask that 
30 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

covered his actual countenance. 

I heard him spoken of at Mallarme's 
as of a brilliant causeur. A friend 
invited Wilde to dinner. There were 
four of us, but Wilde was the only one 
who talked. 

Wilde was not a causeur; he nar- 
rated. During the entire meal he 
hardly once ceased his narrating. He 
spoke slowly, gently ; in a soft voice. 
He spoke admirable French, but as if 
he tapped a little for the words he was 
using. Hardly any accent at all, or 
just the faintest that he chose to 
adopt, giving the words often a quite 

novel and foreign air The 

stories he told us that evening were 
confused and not of his best. Wilde 
was not sure of us, and was testing 
us. Of his wisdom or his folly he 
31 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

gave only what he thought his lis- 
teners might like ; to each he served a 
dish to suit the taste; those who 
expected nothing of him received 
nothing or the merest froth; and, 
since all this was just amusement for 
him, many, who think they know 
him, know him only as an entertainer. 

As we left the restaurant on that 
occasion my friends went ahead, I 
followed with Wilde. 

"You listen with your eyes/' he 
said to me rather abruptly, "that is 
why I tell you this story : 

"When Narcissus died the pool of his 
pleasure changed from a cup of sweet 
waters into a cup of salt tears, and 
the Oreads came weeping through the 
woodland that they might sing to 
the pool and give it comfort. 
32 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

"And when they saw that the pool 
had changed from a cup of sweet 
waters into a cup of salt tears, they 
loosened the green tresses of their 
hair, and cried to the pool, and said : 
1 We do not wonder that you should 
mourn in this manner for Narcissus, 
so beautiful was he.' 

"'But was Narcissus beautiful?' 
said the pool. 

"'Who should know that better 
than you?' answered the Oreads. 
* Us did he ever pass by, but you he 
sought for, and would lie on your 
banks and look down at you, and in 
the mirror of your waters he would 
mirror his own beauty.' 

"And the pool answered: "But I 
loved Narcissus because, as he lay on 
my banks and looked down at me, in 
33 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

the mirror of his eyes I saw my own 
beauty mirrored.' " 

As I said : before others Wilde wore 
a mask, to deceive, to amuse, some- 
times to anger. He never listened, 
and bothered little about any thought 
that was not his own. If he could 
not shine quite alone, he withdrew 
into the shadow. One found him 
there only when one was alone with 
him. 

But so, alone, he began : 

" What have you done since yester- 
day?" 

And as my life had then a very 
ordinary routine, what I told about 
it could hardly interest him at all. I 
rehearsed this very ordinary matter, 
and Wilde's frown showed. 

"Really only that?" 
34 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

" Really nothing new." 

"Then why tell it? Yon must see 
yourself that all that is very uninter- 
esting. There are just two worlds: 
the one exists without one ever speak- 
ing of it ; that is called the real world, 
for one does not need to speak of it to 
perceive its existence. The other is 
the world of art: one must talk of 
that, for without such talk it would 
not exist. 

"There was once a man who was 
beloved in his village for the tales he 
told. Every morning he left the vil- 
lage, and when he returned, at even- 
ing, the villagers, who had tired 
themselves in labor all day long, 
assembled before him and said, — Tell 
us, now, what you saw to-day ! He 
told them : I saw a faun in the wood 
35 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

piping a dance to little woodgods. — 
What else ? Tell us ! said the people. 
— As I came to the sea I saw on the 
waves three sirens combing their green 
locks with a golden comb. — And the 
people loved him because he told them 
stories. 

"One morning he left the village as 
usual — but as he reached the sea he 
saw three sirens, three sirens on the 
waves, combing with golden combs 
their green tresses. And as he fared 
on, he saw in the wood a faun, pip- 
ing before dancing woodnymphs. . 
. . When he reached his village that 
evening and one asked him as of old : 
Tell us! What have you seen? he 
answered : I have seen nothing." 

Wilde paused a little ; let the story 
work into me ; then : 
36 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

"I do not like your lips; they are 
the lips of one who has never lied. I 
shall teach you to lie, that your lips 
may grow beautiful and curved as 
those of an antique mask. 

"Do you know what is art and 
what is nature? And the difference 
between them ? For after all a flower 
is as beautiful as any work of art, so 
the difference between them is not 
merely beauty. Do you know the 
difference ? The work of art is always 
unique. Nature, that creates nothing 
permanent, forever repeats herself, so 
that nothing of what she has created 
may be lost. There are many nar- 
cisse, so each can live but one day. 
And every time that Nature invents a 
new form, she repeats it. A sea- 
monster in one sea knows that its 
37 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

image exists in some other sea. When 
God made a Nero, a Borgia, a Napo- 
leon, he was only replacing their likes ; 
we do not know those others, but 
what matter ? What is important is 
that one succeeded ! For God achieves 
man, and man achieves the work of 
art." 

That Wilde was convinced of his aes- 
thetic mission was made clear to me 
more than once. 

The Gospel disquieted the pagan 
Wilde. He did not forgive its mira- 
cles. Pagan miracles, those were 
works of art; Christianity robbed 
him of those. 

' i When Jesus returned to Nazareth, ' ' 

he said, "Nazareth was so changed 

that he did not know the place. The 

Nazareth of his day had been full of 

38 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

misery and tears ; this town laughed 
and sang. And as the Lord descended 
into the town he saw flower-laden 
slaves hastening up the white steps of 
a marble house. He went into the 
house and saw in a jasper hall reclin- 
ing upon a marble couch one in whose 
hair were twined red roses and whose 
lips were red with wine. And the 
Lord stepped behind him, touched his 
shoulder and spoke to him : ' Why do 
you spend your life like this?' The 
man turned around, knew him, and 
said: 'I was a leper once, and you 
healed me — how else should I live ? ' 

"And the Lord left the house and 
returned upon the street. And after a 
little while he saw one whose face and 
garments were painted, and whose 
feet were shod with pearls. And after 
39 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

her followed a youth, softly, slowly, 
like a hunter, and his coat was of two 
colors, and lust was in his eyes. But 
the face of the woman was as the 
lovely face of a goddess. And the 
Lord touched the youth's hand, and 
said: 'Why look you so upon this 
woman?' And the youth turned 
around, knew him, and said : ' I was 
blind, and you restored my sight. 
Upon what else shall I look ? ' 

"And the Lord approached the 
woman : ' The way you go is the way 
of sin ; why do you go that way ? ' 
And the woman knew him, and said : 
'The way I go is a joyful way, and 
you forgave me my sins.' 

"Then the Lord's heart filled with 
sorrow, and he wished to depart from 
the town. And as he came to the 
40 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

gates, a youth was sitting by the 
roadside, weeping. The Lord ap- 
proached him, touched his hair, and 
said to him : ' Why do you weep ? ' 

4 'And the youth looked up, knew 
him, and said : ' I was dead, and you 
waked me from the dead. What else 
should I do but weep ? ' " 

' ' Shall I tell you a secret?" Wilde 
began, another time — it was at 
Heredia's; he had taken me aside in 
the middle of the crowded salon, and 
was confiding this to me: "Do you 
know why Christ did not love his 
mother?" — He spoke quite softly 
into my ear, as if in shame. Then he 
made a slight pause, took me by the 
arm, and, suddenly breaking into loud 
laughter: "Because she was a vir- 
gin!" 

41 4 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

One morning Wilde bade me read a 
review in which a somewhat unskilful 
critic had congratulated him upon the 
fact that he "gave form and vesture 
to his ideas by way of daintily 
invented stories." 

"They imagine," Wilde began, "that 
all ideas come naked into the world. 
They do not understand that I 
can think in no other way save in 
stories. The sculptor does not trans- 
late his thought into marble; he 
thinks in marble." 

Wilde believed in a sort of fate in 
art, and that ideas were stronger 
than men. "There are," he said, 
"two sorts of artists: these offer us 
answers; those offer questions. One 
must know to which of these sorts 
one belongs ; for he who asks is never 
42 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

he who answers. There are works of 
art that stand waiting, that one does 
not understand for a long time, for 
the reason that they offer answers to 
questions that one has not yet put; 
for often the question conies dread- 
fully long after the answer." 

And he said, also : 

" The soul conies old into the body, 
which must age to give her youth. 
Plato was the youth of Socrates." 

Then I did not see Wilde again for 
three years. 

A stubborn rumor that grew with 
his success as playwright ascribed 
extraordinary habits to Wilde, about 
which some people voiced their irri- 
tation smilingly, others not at all ; it 
was added that Wilde made no secret 
of it, and spoke of it without embar- 
43 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

rassment — some said he spoke with 
bravado, some with cynicism, some 
with affectation. I was very much 
astonished ; nothing in the time I had 
known Wilde had led me to suspect 
this. But already his old friends were 
cautiously leaving him. Not yet did 
one quite disown him. But one no 
longer spoke of having known him. 

An unusual accident brought us 
together again. It was in January, 
1895. A fit of the blues had driven 
me to travel, seeking solitude rather 
than change. I hurried through 
Algiers to Blidah; left Blidah for 
Biskra. Leaving the hotel, my eyes 
fall, in weary curiosity, upon the black 
tablet that bears the names of the 
hotel-guests. And next to my own I 
see Wilde's name. I was hungry for 
44 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

solitude, and I took the sponge and 
wiped my name out. 

Even before I reached the station I 
was in doubt as to whether I had not 
acted as a coward, and I had my trunk 
brought back, and re- wrote my name 
on the tablet. 

In the three years since last I had 
seen him — I do not count a very has- 
ty encounter in Florence — Wilde had 
changed visibly. One felt less softness 
in his look, and there was something 
coarse in his laughter, something 
forced in his gaiety. At the same 
time he seemed more certain of pleas- 
ing, and less anxious to succeed; he 
was bolder, greater, more sure of him- 
self. And curiously enough he spoke no 
longer in parables; not one single story 
did I hear from him the whole time. 
45 



IN MEM0R1AM OSCAR WILDE 

At first I voiced my wonder at 
finding him in Algiers. "I am run- 
ning away from art," he replied, "I 
want to worship only the sun. . . 
Have you never noticed how the sun 
despises all thought ? He always dis- 
courages thought; it flies to the 
shadows. Thought once dwelt in 
Egypt; the sun conquered Egypt. 
Long it lived in Greece ; the sun con- 
quered Greece, then Italy, then 
France. To-day all thought is 
crowded out, driven into Norway, 
and Russia, where the sun never 
comes. The sun is jealous of art." 

To worship the sun, that was to 
worship life. Wilde's lyric worship 
grew fierce and dreadful. A destiny 
determined him; he could not and 
would not escape it. He seemed to 
46 



12V MEM0R1AM OSCAR WILDE 

apply all his care, all his courage to 
the task of exaggerating his fate, and 
making it worse for himself. He went 
about his pleasure as one goes about 
one's duty. "It is my duty," he 
said, "to amuse myself frightfully." 

Nietzsche did not surprise me so 
much, later, because I had heard 
Wilde say: — "Not happiness! Any- 
thing but happiness! But pleasure, 
yes ; pleasure, joy ! One must always 
want what is most tragic." 

As he walked through the streets of 
Algiers, he was the centre of a most 
strange crew ; he chatted with each of 
these fellows ; they delighted him, and 
he threw his money at their heads. 

"I hope," he said, "that I have 
thoroughly demoralised this town." 
I thought of Flaubert's reply, when 
47 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

he had been asked what glory he held 
most worthy — "La gloire de demor- 
atisateur." 

All this filled me with astonishment, 
wonder, and dread. I was aware of 
his shattered condition, of the attacks 
and enmities aimed at him, and what 
dark disquiet he concealed under his 
abandonment of gaiety. One evening 
he appeared to have made up his mind 
to say absolutely nothing serious or 
sincere. His paradoxes irritated me, 
and I told him his plays, his books, 
were far from being as good as his 
talk. Why did he not write as well as 
he talked? "Yes," said Wilde, "the 
plays are not great ; I think nothing 
of them ; . . . but if you only knew 
how amusing they are ! . . . . Inci- 
dentally, most of them are the results 
48 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

of bets. So is 'Dorian Grey.' I wrote 
that in a few days, because one of my 
friends asserted I would never write a 
novel." He leaned towards me and 
added: "Do you wish to know the 
great drama of my life ? I have given 
my genius to my life, to my work only 
my talent." 

Wilde spoke of returning to London; 

the Marquis of Q was abusing 

him, and accusing him of flight. 
"But," I asked, "if you go to Lon- 
don, do you know what you are 
risking?" 

"That is something one should 
never know. My friends are funny; 
they advise caution. Caution! How 
can I have that? That would 
mean my immediate return. I must 
go as far away as possible. And 
49 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

now I can go no farther. Something 
must happen — something different." 

The next morning Wilde was on his 
way to London. 

The rest is well known. That 
1 ' something different ' ' was hard labor 
in prison. 

From prison Wilde came to France. 

In B , a remote little village near 

Dieppe, there settled a Sebastian Mel- 
moth; that was he. Of his French 
friends I had been the last to see him ; 
I wished to be the first to see him 
again. I arrived about midday, with- 
out having announced myself in ad- 
vance. Melmoth, whom friendship 

with T brought often to Dieppe, 

was not expected back that evening. 
He did not arrive until midnight. 
50 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

It was still nearly winter, cold and 
bitter. All day long I mooned about 
the deserted strand, bored and 
moody. How could Wilde have 

chosen this B to live in? This 

boded no good. 

Night came, and I went into the 
hotel, the only one in the place, where 
Melmoth, too, lodged. It was eleven, 
and I had begun to despair of my 
waiting, when I heard wheels. M. 
Melmoth had returned. 

He was numb with cold. On the 
way home he had lost his overcoat. 
A peacock's feather that his servant 
had brought him the day before may 
have given him a foreboding of ill 
luck ; he expresses himself as fortunate 
to have got off with only the loss of 
his overcoat. He shakes with the 
51 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

cold, and the whole hotel is astir to 
make him a hot grog. He scarcely 
has a greeting for me. He does not 
wish to show his emotion before the 
others. And my own excited expecta- 
tion quiets down as I find in Sebastian 
Melmoth so completely the Oscar 
Wilde, — not the hard, strained, force- 
ful Wilde of Algiers, but the soft, pli- 
able Wilde of before the crisis ; I feel 
myself set back not two years, but 
four or five ; the same arresting look, 
the same winning smile, the same voice. 
He lodged in two rooms, the best in 
the house, and had furnished them 
tastefully. Many books on the table, 
among which he showed me my 
"Nourritures Terrestres," then but 
just out. On a high pedestal, in the 
shadow, a Gothic Madonna. 
52 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

We sat at table by lamplight, and 
Wilde sipped his grog. Now, in the 
better light, I note how the skin of his 
face has roughened and coarsened, 
and his hands still more, those hands 
with their fingers still covered by the 
same rings, even the lapis lazuli in its 
pendant setting, to which he was so 
much attached. His teeth are horri- 
bly decayed. 

We chat. I speak of our last meet- 
ing in Algiers, and if he recalls my 
then foretelling his catastrophe. "You 
must have foreseen the danger into 
which you were plunging ? " 

" Of course ! I knew a catastrophe 
would come — this one or that one. I 
expected it. It had to end like that. 
Think! Going on was impossible. 
An end had to be. Prison has utterly 
53 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

changed me. And I have counted on 

that. D is terrible; he will not 

understand my not taking up my old 
life; he accuses the others of hav- 
ing changed me. . . But one can 
never take up the same life. . . My 
life is like a work of art: an artist 
never begins the same thing twice. 
My life, before I was in prison was a 
success. Now it is quite ended." 

Wilde lit a cigarette. 

"The public is dreadful; it judges 
only by what one has done last. If I 
returned to Paris it would see only 
the condemned man. I shall not 
appear again until I have written a 
play." — And then, abruptly : "Was I 
not quite right to come here? My 
friends wanted to order me South, for 
rest, for at first I was quite unstrung. 
54 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

But I begged them to find me a quiet 
little village somewhere in Northern 
France, where I would see nobody, 
where there is some cold and hardly 
any sunshine. I have all that, here. 

"Everyone is very nice to me here, 
especially the clergyman. His little 
church is a great pleasure to me. 
Think : it is called the Church of Our 
Lady of Joy — Isn't that delightful ? — 
And now I am quite sure I shall never 

be able to leave B , for this very 

morning the clergyman has offered me 
a pew! 

"And the customs officers! How 
bored such people are ! I asked them 
if they had nothing to read, and now 
I am getting for them all the novels 
of the elder Dumas. I must stay 
here, eh ? 

55 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

"And the children here worship me. 
On the Queen's birthday I gave a 
feast to forty school-children — the 
whole school was there, with the 
teacher ! For the Queen's Day ! Isn't 
that delightful ? . . . You know, I 
am very fond of the Queen. I always 
have her picture by me." And he 
showed me Nicholson's portrait of the 
Queen pinned to the wall. I arise to 
examine it; a small bookcase is under- 
neath it; I look at the books. I 
wished to induce Wilde to talk more 
seriously. I sit down again, and ask 
him, somewhat timidly, if he has 
read the "Recollections in a Morgue." 
He does not reply directly. 

"These Russian writers are extraor- 
dinary; what makes their books so 
great is the pity they put into them. 
56 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

Formerly I adored 'Madame Bo varie' ; 
but Flaubert would have no pity in 
his books, and the air in them is close ; 
pity is the open door through which a 
book can shine eternally. . . Do you 
know, it was pity that kept me from 
suicide. For the first six months I 
was so dreadfully unhappy that I 
longed to kill myself— but I saw the 
others. I saw their unhappiness; it 
was my pity for them that saved me. 
Oh, the wonder of pity ! And once I 
did not know pity." He said this 
quite softly and without any exalta- 
tion. " Do you know how wonderful 
pity is ? I thanked God every night, 
yes, on my knees I thanked Him, that 
He had made me acquainted with 
pity. For I entered prison with a 
heart of stone, and thought only of 
57 5 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

my own pleasure ; but now my heart 
is quite broken ; pity has entered in ; I 
know now that pity is the greatest 
and loveliest thing in the world. . . 
And that is why I can have nothing 
against those who condemned me, for 
without them I would not have experi- 
enced all this. D writes me hor- 
rible letters; he writes that he does 
not understand me, does not under- 
stand my not taking arms against the 
whole world; since all have been 
abominable to me. . . No; he does 
not understand, cannot understand 
me. In every letter I tell him that our 
ways lie apart; his is the way of 
pleasure — mine is not. His is that of 
Alcibiades; mine that of St. Francis 
of Assisi. . . Do you know St. 
Francis ? Will you do me a very great 
58 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

pleasure ? Send me the best life of our 
Saviour! " 
I promised ; and he went on : 
" Yes — towards the last we had a 
splendid warden, a charming man! 
But for the first six months, I was 
utterly, completely unhappy. The 
warden, then, was a horrible crea- 
ture, a cruel Jew, without any ima- 
gination." I had to laugh at the 
absurdity of this rapidly uttered 
comment, and Wilde laughed too. 

"Yes, he did not know what to 
invent for our torturing. . . You 
shall see how void of imagination the 
man was. You must know that in 
prison one has but an hour in the 
sunshine, that is, one marches around 
the yard in a circle, one after the 
other, and is forbidden to say a 
59 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

word. One is watched, and there are 
dreadful punishments if one is caught 
talking. The novices, who are in 
prison for the first time, can be distin- 
guished by their inability to speak 
without moving their lips. For ten 
weeks I had been there, and had 
not spoken a word to a soul. One 
evening, just as we are making our 
round, one behind the other, I sud- 
denly hear my name spoken behind 
me. It was the prisoner behind me, 
who was saying : ' Oscar Wilde, I pit} r 
you, for you are suffering more than 
we.' I made the greatest efforts not 
to be observed, and said, without 
turning around: 'No, my friend; we 
all suffer alike.' And on that day I 
did not think of suicide. 
"In this way we often talked 
60 



IN MBMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

together. I knew his name and what 

he was in for. He was called P , 

and was a fine fellow! But I had 
not yet the trick of speaking with 
motionless lips, and one evening *C. 
33!' (—that was I—) 'C.33andC48 
fall out ! ' We left the rank, and the 
turnkey said: 'You are to go before 
the warden ! ' And as pity was 
already in my heart I had fear only 
for him; I was even happy that 
I must suffer on his account. — Well, 
the warden was simply a monster. 

He called P first; he wished to 

hear us separately — since the punish- 
ment for the one who has spoken first 
is twice as heavy as for the other; 
usually the former gets a fortnight in 
the dark cell, the latter only a week ; 
so the warden wanted to know which 
61 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

of us two had been the first. And of 

course P said he was. And when 

the warden interrogated me presently, 
of course I, too, said it had been I. 
That enraged the man so that his face 
went scarlet, for he could not under- 
stand such a thing. 'But P 

declares also that he began ! I don't 
understand. . .' 

"What do you say to that, mon 
cher? He could not understand ! He 
was very much embarrassed. 'But I 
have already given him fourteen 
days. . .' and then: 'Very well! If 
this is the case, you simply both get 
fourteen days.' Splendid, that, eh? 
The man simply had not an atom of 
imagination." Wilde was greatly 
amused; he laughed, and went on 
talking gaily: 

62 



IN MBMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

" Naturally, after the fourteen days, 
our desire to talk was all the keener. 
You know how sweet is the sensation 
of suffering for others. Gradually — 
one did not always parade in just the 
same sequence — gradually I managed 
to talk with all of them! I knew 
the name of every single one, his 
story, and when he would be leaving 
prison. And to each I said : The first 
thing you are to do when you come 
out is to go to the post-office; there 
will be a letter there for you with 
money. . . There were some splen- 
did fellows among them. Will you 
believe me if I tell you that already 
some three of my fellow prisoners 
have visited me here? Is that not 
wonderful ? 

"The unimaginative warden was 
63 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

succeeded by a very nice one. Now I 
could ask to read whatever I wished. 
I thought of the Greeks, and that they 
would please me. I asked for Sopho- 
cles, but he was not to my taste. 
Then I thought of the writers on reli- 
gion; those, too, failed to hold me. 
And suddenly I thought of Dante. . . 
oh, Dante ! I read Dante every day in 
the Italian, every page of him; but 
neither the Purgatory nor the Para- 
dise was intended for me. But the 
Inferno! What else was I to do but 
adore it? Hell — were we not dwell- 
ing in it ? Hell, that was the prison." 

The same night he spoke to me of 
his dramatic scheme of a Pharaoh, 
and of a spirited story on Judas. 

The following morning Wilde took 
me to a charming little house, not far 
64 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

from the hotel, that he had rented, 
and was beginning to furnish. Here 
he meant to write his plays : first, the 
Pharaoh, than an "Achab and Isa- 
bella," the story of which he told 
marvellously. 

The carriage that is to drive me off 
is ready. Wilde gets in with me to 
accompany me a little distance. He 
speaks of my book, praises it cau- 
tiously. The carriage stops. Wilde 
gets out and says goodbye; then 
abruptly : " Look here, mon cher, you 
must promise me something. The 
1 Nourritures Terrestres ' is good . . . 
very good. But, mon cher, promise 
me never again to write ' I ' again. In 
art there is no first person." 

Back in Paris again, I told D my 

news. He declared : 
65 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

"All that is quite ridiculous. Wilde 
is incapable of suffering boredom. I 
know him very well ; he writes to me 
every day. I dare say he may finish 
his play first, but then he will come 
back to me. He never did anything 
great in solitude, he needs distrac- 
tions. He wrote his best while with 
me. — Look at his last letter. . ." 

D read it out to me. In it Wilde 

implored D to let him finish his 

Pharaoh in peace ; that then he would 
return, return to him. The letter 
closed with this glorious sentenc — 
" And then I shall be King of Life once 
more!" 

Soon afterward Wilde returned to 

Paris. The play was, and remained, 

unwritten. When Society wishes to 

destroy a man, she knows what is 

66 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

needed, and she has methods more 
subtle than death. . . Wilde had for 
two years suffered too much and too 
passively; his will was broken. For 
the first few months he was still able 
to set up 'illusions for himself; but 
soon he gave up even those. It was 
an abdication. Nothing was left of 
his crushed life but the sorrowful 
memory of what he had once been; 
some wit still was there ; occasionally 
he tested it, as if to try whether he 
still was capable of thought ; but it 
was a crackling, unnatural, tortured 
wit. I only saw Wilde twice again. 
One evening on the Boulevards, as I 

was walking with G , I heard 

myself called by name. I turn round, 

it was Wilde ! How changed he was ! 

"If I should reappear before I have 

67 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

written my play, the world will see in 
me only the convict," he had said. 
He had returned without his play, 
and when some doors closed against 
him he sought entry nowhere else ; he 
turned vagabond. Friends often tried 
to save him ; one tried to think what 
was to be done for him; one took 
him to Italy. Wilde soon escaped, 
slipped back. Of those who had re- 
mained longest faithful to him, some 
had several times told me that Wilde 
had disappeared. Hence I was, I 
admit, a trifle embarrassed to see 
him again like that, in that place. 
Wilde was sitting on the terrace of a 
cafe\ He ordered two cocktails for 

myself and G . I sat down facing 

him, so that my back was to those 

passing. Wilde noticed that and 

68 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

ascribed it to an absurd shame on my 
part, and not altogether, I regret to 
say, with injustice. 

" Oh," he said, " sit down here, next 
to me," and pointed to a chair by his 
side, "I am so utterly alone now!" 

Wilde was still quite well dressed ; 
but his hat no longer was brilliant, 
his collar was still of the old cut but 
not quite so immaculate, and the 
sleeves of his coat showed faint fringes. 

' 'When once I met Verlaine," he 
began, with a touch of pride, "I did 
not blush at him. I was rich, joyous, 
famous, but I felt that it was an 
honour for me to be seen with Ver- 
laine, even though he was drunk." 
Perhaps because he feared to bore 

G , he suddenly changed his tone, 

attempted to be witty, to jest; his talk 
69 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

became mere stumbling. As we arose 
Wilde insisted upon paying. When I 
was bidding him farewell he took me 
aside and said, in a low and confused 
tone, " Listen: you must pay . . . 
I am quite without means. . . ." 

A few days later I saw him again 
for the last time. Let me mention but 
one thing of those we talked of: he 
bewailed his inability to undertake 
his art once more. I reminded him of 
his promise, that he had made to 
himself, not to return to Paris with- 
out a completed play. 

He interrupted me, laid his hand on 
mine, and looked at me quite sadly : 

" One must ask nothing of one who 
has failed." 

Oscar Wilde died in a miserable little 
hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts. 
70 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

Seven persons followed to his funeral, 
and not all of these accompanied him 
to his last resting-place. Flowers and 
wreaths lay on the coffin. Only one 
piece bore an inscription ; it was from 
his landlord ; and on it one read these 
words : " A mon locataire. ' ' 



71 



IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 

BY 

ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 



TF, WITHOUT looking more closely, 
-*- one happened to notice this slowly 
moving and very solemn gentleman as 
he strolled our boulevards in his ex- 
pansive corpulence, one jumped at 
once to the conclusion that to himself 
and in himself he appeared as a 
mourning processional. 

Never was there a more utter victim 
of the misunderstanding between the 
mob and the poet. The public longs 
75 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

to be fooled. It has a right to decep- 
tion, as it has a right to bread, or to 
its dreams — and the real dreams of 
the night-time are so rare and so dif- 
ficult! It wants to dream, of an 
evening, in the theatre, so that in the 
daytime it may have matter for aston- 
ishment and for wonder ; it wants to 
be excited, at break of day, before 
work comes, by the murders and 
crimes in the newspapers. 

When once a thaumaturg — and I 
choose the word purposely, one that 
Wilde respected highly — undertakes 
to fool the public, he has the right to 
choose his material where he finds it ; 
one does not expect of him moral and 
social lessons, but inventions, tricks, 
words, a touch of heaven and a touch 
of hell, and what not else ; he must be 
76 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 



Proteus and Prometheus, must be 
able to transform all things, and him- 
self; he must reveal the secret of this 
or that life for the readers of his paper 
or the patrons of his theatre ; he must 
be confessor, prophet and magician; 
he must dissect the world with the 
exactness of a doctrinarian and re- 
create it anew the moment after, by 
the light of his poetic fancy ; he must 
produce formulas and paradoxes, and 
even barbaric puns with nothing save 
their antiquity to save them. 

For this price — a well paid one — he 
can find distraction after the manner 
of the gods or the fallen angels, and 
seek for himself excitements and de- 
ceptions, since he has advanced, and 
eventually crossed the borders of ordi- 
nary human emotions and sensations. 
77 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

Wilde had paid the price. Now, with 
the coin of his artistic triumphs, he 
longed among a thousand nobler and 
more interesting things, to play the 
young man. 

He played badly. 

Now it was the public that was 
duped in duping him. For the only 
fortune, good or bad, permitted to 
the poet is of the sort that an octo- 
genarian biographer delights to pre- 
sent after the poet's death. 

Wilde in exile remained always 
English: I mean to say that he had 
pity with all victims without hatred 
for the judges. He approved com- 
pletely of the sentence and execution 
of that Louise Masset who was 
hanged for the killing of her child. He 
followed closely the course of events 
78 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

in the Transvaal, and was all enthu- 
siasm for Kitchener and Roberts, a 
touching trait in an exile. Irishman 
by birth, an Italian in his inclinations, 
Greek in culture and Parisian in his 
passion for paradox and blague, he 
never could forget London — London, 
in whose fogs he had found all his 
triumphs ; London, into which he had 
brought all exotic civilisations ; Lon- 
don, that in his vanity he had trans- 
formed into a monstrous garden of 
flowers and palaces, of subtlest sug- 
gestion and discreetest charm. His 
impertinences toward the English had 
been those of a benevolent monarch. 
When he came late into a salon, with- 
out greeting to anyone, accosted the 
hostess and asked, quite audibly : "Do 
I know anybody here?" that was 
79 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

nothing but his singular gallantry; 
he had by no means the intention of 
slighting this one or that one, but 
wished merely to avoid the appear- 
ance of knowing all the world, inas- 
much as the hostess herself probably 
knew only a small number of her 
guests. He has been accused of a 
green carnation and a cigarette; it 
was for that, perhaps, that for 
twenty -four months he was deprived 
of all tobacco and all flowers. He 
has been reproached of having spent 
twice the 150,000 francs his plays 
brought him in; he was declared 
bankrupt. His name was erased from 
the hoardings and from the memories 
of men ; his children were taken away 
from him ; all this because the public 
wished to amaze him with its cruelty. 
80 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

Still this was not the end. From 
the moment that he set foot on our 
soil we were witnesses to a terrible 
tragedy: his effort to pick up the 
thread of his life. This giant, whom 
lack of sleep, of nourishment, of peace 
and of books, had been unable to 
destroy and scarcely to weaken, asked 
of the sea, of Paris and of Naples, 
that they harbor the dawn of a new 
era in his art. 

He failed. 

At forty, confident in the future, he 
failed. He could but reach out with 
impotent arms into the past, lose him- 
self in bitter memories. American 
managers clamored for a new play of 
his ; all he could do was to give Leon- 
ard Smithers "An Ideal Husband" 
to print, a play several years old. 
81 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

His heavy lids drooped upon cher- 
ished dreams : his successes ; he walked 
slowly, in short paces, so as not to 
disturb his memories; he loved the 
solitude one gave him, since it left him 
alone with what he had once been. 
Yet still the evil habit was on him of 
haunting, with some companion, the 
obscurest streets, dreaming of similar 
adventures in London. . . always 
London ! 

He had to have that oblivion which 
alcohol denied him. For even in the 
bars it was London he sought. There 
was left for him nothing but the 
American bars, which were not to his 
liking. One evening at Chatham's he 
had been told his presence was unwel- 
come. There on the terrace he had 
tried to distract his incurious eyes, 
82 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

but the passers-by gazed at him too 
curiously ; he gave up even that. 

All his face was furrowed by tears. 
His eyes seemed caverns hollowed out 
by pale tears; his heavy lips seemed 
compact of sobs and oozing blood; 
and everywhere was that horrible 
bloating of the skin that signals 
human fear and heart-ache corroding 
the body. An unwieldy ghost, an 
enormous caricature, he cowered over 
a cocktail, always improvising for the 
curious, for the known, and for the 
unknown— for anyone— his tired and 
tainted paradoxes. But mostly it 
was for himself he improvised; he 
must assure himself he still could, still 
would, still knew. 

He knew everything. 

Everything. The commentaries on 
83 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

Dante; the sources of Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti; the events and the battles 
of history — of all he could talk as a 
stripling talks, smiling sometimes his 
smile that was of purgatory, and 
laughing — laughing at nothing, shak- 
ing his paunch, his jowls, and the 
gold in his poor teeth. 

Slowly, word for word, he would in- 
vent in his feverish, stumbling agony 
of art, curious, fleeting parables: 
the story of the man who, having 
received a worthless coin, voyages 
forth to meet in combat the ruler 
whose doubly counterfeit presentment 
he has found. . . But he lacked, 
for the setting down of these tales, 
the golden tablet of Seneca. 

He wasted himself in words; per- 
haps he tried to lose himself in them. 
84 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

He sought scholars that he might find 
in them an excuse for finding himselt 
again, for living anew, for being born 
again, and to keep him from overmuch 
thinking about ungrateful plagiarists. 

Wilde once told a tale of a king and 
a beggar, and said at close: "I have 
been king; now I will be a beggar." 
Yet he remained to the very last day 
the perfect, well-groomed Englishman 
— and did not beg. 

That would indeed have been a new- 
life, this life that fate denied him. 

Words fail to paint properly the 
chaos of hope, of words and laughter, 
the mad sequence of half-concluded 
sentences, into which this poet 
plunged, proving to himself his still 
inextinguished fancy, his battling 
against surrender, his smiling at fate ; 
85 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

or to suggest the grim dark into 
which he always must turn, daily 
fearing death, in the narrow chamber 
of a sordid inn. 

He had been in the country, in Italy, 
and he longed for Spain, for the Med- 
iterranean; there was nothing for him 
save Paris — a Paris gradually closing 
against him, a deaf Paris, bloodless, 
heartless, a city without eternity and 
without legend. 

Each day brought him sorrows ; he 
had neither followers nor friends ; the 
direst neurasthenia tortured him. 
Want clutched at him ; the pittance of 
ten francs a day allowed him by his 
family was no longer increased by any 
advances from his publishers ; he must 
needs work, write plays that he had 
already contracted to undertake, — 
86 



7,Y MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

and he was physically unable to arise 
from his bed before three in the after- 
noon! 

He did not sour under all this; he 
simply let himself run down. One day 
he takes to his bed, and pretends that 
he has been poisoned by a dish of 
mussels in a restaurant ; he gets up 
again, but wearily, and with thoughts 
of death. 

He attempts his stories all over 
again. It is like nothing save the bitter, 
blinding brilliance of a super-human 
firework. All who saw him at the 
close of his career, still spraying forth 
the splendor of his wit and his inven- 
tion, whittling out the golden, jeweled 
fragments of his genius, with which 
he was to fashion and embroider the 
plays and poems he still meant to do 
87 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

— who saw him proudly lifting his 
face to the stars the while he coughed 
his last words, his last laughter,— 
will never forget the tremendous, trag- 
ic spectacle as of one calmly damned 
yet proudly refusing utterly to bend 
the neck. 

Nature, at last kind to him who had 
denied her, gathered all her glories 
together for him in the Exposition. 
He died of its passing, as he died of 
everything. He had loved it, had 
drunk it in large measures, greedily, 
as one drinks blood on the battlefield. 
In every palace of it he built again his 
own palace of fame, riches and im- 
mortality. 

For this dying man it was a long 
and lovely dream. One day he passed 
out through the Porte de l'Alma to 
88 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

look at Rodin's work. He was almost 
the only wayfarer thither. That, too, 
is tragedy; and the master showed 
him, quite near by, the Porte de 
l'Enfer. 

But enough of details: on to the 
end. 

Thirteen persons, in a bedroom out 
by the city limits, remove their hats 
before a coffin marked with a No. 13 ; 
a shaky hearse with shabby metal 
ornaments ; two landaus instead of a 
funeral coach; a wreath of laurel; 
faded flowers; a church that is not 
draped for death, that tolls no death- 
note, and opens only a narrow side- 
entrance for the procession; a dumb 
and empty mass without music; an 
absolution intoned in English, the 
liturgic Latin turned to a non-con- 
89 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

formist jumble; the glittering salute 
of a captain of the guard on the Place 
Saint Germain-des-Pres ; three report- 
ers counting the participants with 
cold-blooded precision — that is the 
farewell that the world takes from one 
of its children, from one who had 
wished to illuminate and spread far 
the splendor of its dream; — that is 
the knell of a life of phantasms and of 
dreams of impossible beauty; — that 
is the forgiveness and the recompense; 
— that, on a false dawn, is the first 
rosy light of immortality. 

Wilde, who was a Catholic, received 
but two sacraments: the first while in 
a coma, the last in his last sleep. The 
priest who looked after him was 
bearded and English ; seemed himself 
a convert. In all justice I would as- 
90 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

sert here that Wilde was sincerely 
enough a Catholic not to have need of 
the last rites ; that he devoutly loved 
all the Romish pomp and ceremony, 
even to the color-effects of the stained 
windows and the notes of the organ ; 
and that some of all this might rightly 
have been his due, rather than this 
stolid farce, this hasty burying, this 
oppressive absolution, in which the 
vicar seemed to be washing his hands 
clean of this taint of unrighteousness. 

It was in our hearts, in us, that the 
true religion was. 

I cannot judge, cannot praise, 
Oscar Wilde here. Properly to seize 
and set forth his curious genius were 
a greater task. One will not find that 
genius in his writings. Witty and 
sublime it is, there; but, for him, too 
91 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

piecemeal. His work is the shadow of 
his thoughts, the shadow of his illumi- 
nating speech. 

One must conceive him as one who 
knew everything and said every- 
thing in the best way. A Brummell, 
who was a Brummell even in his 
genial moments. And one who would 
have fulfilled that part while tasting 
of shame and of unhappiness. 

None believed in Art more than 
Wilde. 

I will close this oration by an allu- 
sion to his simplicity. Wilde, who 
suffered so much, suffered under his 
reputation of being affected. One 
evening Wilde, who was not usually 
fond of publicly deploring his lost 
treasures, lamented his paternity. 
After he had told me of his son 
92 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 



Vivian's conversion to the Catholic 
faith, the boy having quite simply 
declared to his guardian "I am a 
Catholic," Wilde said with a smile, 
"And Vivian, twelve years old, lies 
down on a couch, and when they wish 
him to get up, says: 'Leave me — I 
am thinking ! ' with a gesture, mind 
you, of my own — a gesture that peo- 
ple have jeered at and of which they 
have always declared it was affected!" 
That was the beginning of a rehabili- 
tation among the mob. 

And now the grandson of this 
Mathurin, who admired Balzac, from 
whom this unfortunate borrowed 
his fatal pseudonym of Sebastian 
Melmoth, sleeps; he sleeps, this son 
of a noble and learned father and 
mother, at whose christening stood a 
93 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

King of Sweden; sleeps, and sleeps 
badly, in a churchyard that is far 
enough away to choke the courage 
and the prayers of whoso might wish 
to venture there. Hardly will the 
echo of borrowed fables wake or lull 
him. Hardly will the occasional 
utterance of his name in scandal reach 
him, bringing its burden of insult. 

He will, I hope, pardon me these 
words, uttered only for history, for 
sincerity and for justice, and to be 
witnesses for one who was his friend 
in evil days, who is neither aesthete 
nor cynic, and who in all humility 
sends greeting to him in his silence 
and his peace. 



94 



IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 

BY 

FRANZ BLEI 



IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 



LIFE is frightfully devoid of form. 
Its catastrophes occur in the 
wrong places and to the wrong people. 
Grotesque horror plays round about 
its comedies, and its tragedies wind 
up in farce. It wounds you when you 
would approach it ; it lasts too long 
or too briefly." 

If one seek an example to these 
sentiments, one would find none better 
than the life of him who uttered them. 
97 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

For every word of Oscar Wilde's came 
true in his own case, up to that one 
which declared that Art, and Art 
alone, could safeguard us against the 
soiling dangers of life. His passion for 
discovering the ways that fare 
between Truth and Beauty led him 
into discredited paths that spelt 
anathema to the conventional; he 
believed he could tread those ways 
safely, since he carried before him 
the illumining torch of Beauty. But 
Life always wounds those who ap- 
proach it from dreams. And Wilde, 
like his own Dorian, had moments in 
which he saw evil only as a means 
towards realising his conception of 
the beautiful, and so one saw him con- 
sorting with evil. He recognized sin 
as the only thing that in our time has 
98 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

kept color and life, and that we cannot 
hark back to holiness and can learn 
far more from the sinner. As Dorian 
was, so was he a type that our time 
desires strongly and yet fears, that we 
picture to ourselves in secret fancies 
and worshippings and yet crucify 
when it comes to life. For not yet is 
there one law over both thought and 
deed, and we must be grateful to this 
divorce for our scheme of life, without 
which our world would be the richer 
only for one animal without sin. 

Wilde's literary residue would be 
important enough to secure his name 
to posterity. But his life encountered 
a fate that took precedence, with its 
grotesque tragedy, over his work, and 
overshadowed it scurrilously with a 
blackness that, in England, was as a 
99 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 



night of pestilence. One may almost 
admire the stupid power for cruelty in 
such a people that— peer and butcher- 
boy acting as one man — dealt out to 
its one-time darling a two years' tor- 
ture, and, not satisfied with that, 
wished to stamp out even the memory 
of him as of one infamous. One must 
needs explain this cruelty as a mob 
outbreak of Saddism, not to be found 
altogether extraordinary there, where 
flagellation marks the highest plane of 
erotic culture. 

English society is always ruled by a 
dandy, and not only since the days of 
Brummel and Selwyn. The greater 
the dandy, the more absolute his rule. 
Wilde was the acknowledged master 
and tyrant; he lashed that society 
and spared not, and it cringed before 
100 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

him, since he was dandy by the grace 
of God. Magic words he had, that 
paradoxically subjugated the truths 
of to-morrow. Yet somewhere a lover 
hides always in his scabbard of sense- 
less love a dagger of hate that some 
day is bared and kills the beloved. 
Does one really measure the punish- 
ment and martyrdom of Wilde by the 
wrong represented in his little Socratic 
diversions? Everyone knows that at 
Eton and Cambridge Greek is not 
merely a matter of learning, and no 
understanding person thinks that 
strange, or as anything that concerns 
the law. The law's absurd clause was 
only an excuse. The sentence was exe- 
cuted simply because the monarch had 
become unbearable. Wilde was both 
a dandy and a genius; democracy 
101 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

can suffer neither in the long run. 
"Dandyism is simply a manner of 
being, and is not to be made in any 
way tangibly visible." One notes 
from this sentence that Barbey 
d'Aurevilly does not insist upon the 
importance of the dandy's more speci- 
fic arts — of body and vesture — as 
compared to the beautifully shaded 
art that may be achieved by mere liv- 
ing. This is wrong. One may live 
one's life in the most delicate shadings, 
may dress and act as a dandy, and 
yet remain, like Whistler, merely a 
painter. It is the visible, material 
elements that compose the importance 
of the whole. The dandy is, before 
all else, a decorative artist, whose 
material is his own body. That 
seems but a slight matter. But, if all 
102 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

the world went naked, one would 
have a higher and better valuation of 
the one exception that went clothed. 
The dandy is an artist. He is egoistic 
as an artist, delights, like him, to deal 
with the world, and feels, like the 
artist, most in his element when con- 
spicuously alone. Only one distinction 
I would draw between them, and that 
is upon a point of art: that of the 
dandy is unselfish, since he offers it to 
all who wish to see. One error should 
be scouted : clerks and dignitaries who 
happen to dress exaggeratedly, are by 
no means dandies. Not all who 
versify are poets. The clerks and the 
dignitaries may compose their toil- 
ettes as finely as they will; they are 
still primarily clerks and dignitaries. 
Dandyism, too, like every other art, 
103 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

has its dilettanti. But here is the 
case: the whole being of the dandy 
must be full of his art; all that he 
does, says, and thinks, must emanate 
from his dandyism. And, unlike other 
artists, he may never be less than his 
work; on this or that point his per- 
sonality must always loom as the 
greater — greater than all the sum of 
all his powers that only come singly 
to utterance. A dandy will say that a 
really well arranged bouquet for the 
buttonhole is the only thing that joins 
art and nature, for he has seen it as 
life's first duty to be as artistic as pos- 
sible, and knows that the second duty 
has not yet been discovered. 

No dandy has more conscientiously 
fulfilled this duty than Wilde; later 
days proved that in this fulfilment he 
104 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

had spent his genius. He wrote occa- 
sionally, when he had no audience; 
for as a dandy he was of the type that 
spends its life declaiming. No poet 
ever set art above nature more nobly 
than Wilde, for his ambition was not 
to be a poet, but more than that : a 
dandy. He dreamed of an abstract 
beauty that might never run into the 
danger of losing itself in life, since it 
never arose out of life, — of a beauty 
that would prove nothing, that would 
not even have any intrinsic purpose. 
For even this conscious purpose in 
beauty seemed to him only, at best, a 
moral pose in disguise. 

It is not in his writings that one will 

find this strange man's genius ; only a 

shadow of it is there. One who, like 

Wilde, does not center his artistic 

105 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

temperament upon a single expres- 
sion, upon the art and craft of a single 
book or a single poem, but utters it 
rather in his whole living and being, 
will achieve in his books and poems 
only the fragmentary that even to 
himself must seem slight, and that 
must always be subject for his own 
irony. " All bad writing is the result 
of sincere feeling" — Wilde asserted 
that when he was at the height of 
his fame, when he ranked the poet and 
poetry far beneath dandyism, and 
gladly deserted poetry in favor of suc- 
cess as dandy. Only when he was 
neglected and despised and ill and 
miserable, sincere feeling bred in him 
his one great poem: The Ballad of 
Reading Gaol. He could assert his 
paradox only as a dandy ; as poet he 
106 



IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 

went counter to it. Then he had 
fashioned art into his life; now life 
fashioned him to his art. 



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